Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Ancient Red-Head Giant of China-Cherchen Mummy.-WackyWhatever?

Ancient Lost Race

Mair, a professor of Chinese in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, had long doubted this version of history. He suspected that the Chinese had encountered Westerners from Europe long before the emperor Wudi dreamed up his military alliance. Several early Chinese books, for example, described tall men with green eyes and red hair that resembled the fur of rhesus monkeys. Most scholars dismissed these accounts as legendary, but Mair wasn't so sure. He thought they were descriptions of Caucasian men. During his studies of Chinese mythology, he had found stories strikingly similar to those in early Greek and Roman tales. The parallels were too frequent to be mere coincidences. And he kept stumbling across words in early Chinese texts that seemed to have been borrowed from ancient languages far to the west. Among these were the words for dog, cow, goose, grape, and wheel. But though Mair repeatedly argued the case for early trade and contact between China and the West, he had no hard archaeological evidence of contact, and no one took him very seriously. "People would laugh at me. I said that East and West were communicating back in the Bronze Age and people just said, 'Oh yeah? Interesting, but prove it.' " Never for a moment did Mair expect to find the kind of flesh-and-blood vindication that Cherchen Man promised. Still, he was wary of a hoax. The man's tailored woolen clothing, with all the complex textile technology it implied, was unlike anything Mair had ever seen from ancient Asia, let alone a remote outpost like Xinjiang. The mummy itself seemed almost too perfectly preserved to be true. "I thought it was part of a wax museum or something, a ploy to get more tourists. How could they have such advanced textile technology three thousand years ago? I couldn't put it into any historical context. It didn't make any sense whatsoever."Indepth

While guiding an American tour group around a museum in a remote part of China, Victor Mair made a stunning discovery--An incredibly well preserved Mummy with flowing red hair and striking Caucasian features.

DNA testing found the cadaver to be of Celtic origin and possibly one of the people who spoke the ancient lost language of Tocharian. The most salient thing about the tests, however, was the age of the specimen.--three thousand-years-old. The discovery completely turned the idea that the first Europeans arrived in China by way of the Silk Road app-- 200BC
The most interesting questions about these people are-- How did they get to this remote spot in the first place.
Did they pre-date the Asian people in the area.
What happened to them:-they seemed to have been wiped out in a single blow.